Chapter Title: The Modern Girl as Militant (Movement on the Streets)
Book Title: Erotic Grotesque Nonsense
Book Subtitle: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times
Book Author(s): MIRIAM SILVERBERG
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppn8h.8
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access to Erotic Grotesque Nonsense
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part ii
Japanese Modern Sites
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1
The Modern Girl as Militant
(Movement on the Streets)
Where can you folks clearly say that there is a typical
Modern Girl?
Kataoka Teppei
Let’s get naked and while we’re at it work our damnedest.
Hayashi Fumiko
The Modern Girl makes only a brief appearance in our histories of prewar
Japan. She is a glittering, decadent, middle-class consumer who, through her
clothing, smoking and drinking, flaunts tradition in the urban playgrounds
of the late 1920s. Arm in arm with her male equivalent, the mobo (Modern
Boy), and fleshed out in the Western flapper’s garb of the roaring twenties,
she engages in ginbura (Ginza-cruising). Yet by merely equating the Japanese Modern Girl with the flapper we do her a disservice, for the Modern
Girl was not on a Western trajectory. Moreover, during the modern years
when this female, a creation of the mass media, titillated her Japanese audience, she was not easily defined. Who was this Modern Girl? What made her
do what she did? These two questions, raised by the Japanese Modern Girl’s
contemporaries, are also the two problems posed in this part of my montage
of Japanese erotic grotesque nonsense.1
The Modern Girl was a highly commodified cultural construct crafted by
journalists who debated her identity during the tumultuous decade of cultural and social change following the great earthquake of 1923. By asking
first of all who she was, I am concerned more with the representation of the
Modern Girl as the most predominant Japanese cultural heroine of the era
than with the actual beliefs or practices of the young women of that era.
Therefore I do not call the heroine by her nickname, moga, for to do so would
be to deny her the full respect that is her due. (For, as will be shown, the café
waitress was identified with new leisure activities at the same time that the
housewives of the new era were expected to execute a newly rationalized series of domestic practices while waiting at home for the café waitress’s besotted customer, but it was the Modern Girl who was made most emblematic of the female eroticism with which the press was obsessed.)
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Japanese Modern Sites
As for what made her do what she did, the question has been appropriated from the title of the hit movie of 1930, Nani ga Kanojo wo so Sasetaka
(What Made Her Do What She Did?), a film that happened to be a “tendency” or left-wing movie. In this saga of an orphan turned criminal, based
on a play by Fujimori Seikichi, the heroine withstood varied forms of servitude, including domestic labor for a lecherous government official, before
taking her revenge by setting fire to a Christian institution for wayward
girls. According to Fujimori’s stage directions, published in 1927, at this moment the curtain was to fall on the electrically lit query, “What made her do
what she did?” floating above the flames. The movie audience, which included members of the new salaried middle class, off-duty groups of geisha,
and working men and women, who had crowded into Asakusa—the honky
tonk nightlife neighborhood of Tokyo documented by Gonda Yasunosuke—
to watch the show, had to formulate their own answers to this question. The
historian must do the same when asking why the Modern Girl moved so
vigorously through the closing years of the 1920s. To answer this question,
the Modern Girl must be made a part of the political economy and sociocultural transformations of her time.2
identifying the modern girl
Kitazawa Shuichi established the character of the Modern Girl as apolitical
but militantly autonomous in his article “Modern Girl” (“Modan Gaaru”).
She was neither an advocate of expanded rights for women nor a suffragette; nevertheless she had no intention of being a slave to men. The selfrespecting Modern Girl had liberated herself from age-old traditions and
conventions, and now, suddenly, without any argument or explanation, she
had stepped out onto the same starting line with men in order to walk beside them. Kitazawa saw a reconstruction of gender accompanying this reordering of power, but he did not bemoan the fact that woman was becoming more like man both spiritually and physically, for what woman had lost
in grace she had gained in a newfound animation.3
Nii Itaru, who is usually given credit for coining the term modan gaaru,
followed with his “Contours of the Modern Girl” in a 1925 issue of another
women’s magazine, Fujin Koron (Ladies’ review). He provided a character
sketch of someone who, like Kitazawa’s Modern Girl, was highly animated.
She was also “brightly breezy” and shockingly fond of the double entendre
and other erotic come-hithers. One young woman, for example, after a
single meeting with the author, had sent him a note that read, “I am lonely
all alone today. Please come visit.” Nii reported that he did not know how
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to interpret this message, but he was convinced that all contemporary
young women were in the process of changing for the sake of “liberation
and freedom of expression.” Nii admitted that the contemporary young Japanese woman was aggressive and erotic, but was she in fact like her European counterpart, the modern young woman, whom he likened to a bouncing ball of reason, will, and emotion, thrown at full force? And was the
anarchistic Modern Girl a creature to be lauded as the proletarian emblem
of revolutionary possibility, or should she be reviled as one final expression
of a decaying class, owing to her origins in the wealthier strata of society?
Nii offered his readers choices, but he would not take a stand.4
Nii’s ambiguity set the tone for Japanese mass journalism. From 1925
until the early 1930s, writers attempted to flesh out the contours provided
by Nii in such print media as the cartoon series about an aggressive Modern Girl and a passive Modern Boy titled Mogako and Moboro, sensational
newspaper articles, advice columns, and special issues of popular magazines
aimed at both men and women. While ambiguity remained, a composite picture of a Modern Girl does emerge from a select reading of articles written
by journalists and feminist critics of the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, circulation statistics for the mass press indicate the power of the Modern Girl to
travel nationwide. Those selling the Modern Girl took advantage of the national network that had been in existence since the turn of the century. For
example, the circulation of Ie no Hikari, the journal of the agricultural cooperative movement that would be found in more than half of Japanese
rural households and in the colonies by 1941, had a circulation of 105,000
by 1931, when the discourse of erotic grotesque nonsense was at its height;
this grew to one million copies by 1935.5
Who was she? First and foremost, the Modern Girl was defined by her
body, specifically by her short hair and long, straight legs. In a brief disquisition titled simply “Woman’s Legs,” the proletarian writer Kataoka Teppei
argued that although other eras of Japanese history had been graced by
sightly legs, the legs of the Modern Girl were a product of the ability of the
human spirit to shape the human form; her legs symbolized the Modern
Girl’s growing ability to create a new life for women. The author ended his
polemic with a hortatory appreciation of the Modern Girl in motion: “Onward! Dance! Legs! Legs! Legs!”6
Discussion of fashion is always talk about the female body, as another article, “Studies on the Modern Girl,” made blatantly clear. In the course of
his attempt to define the Modern Girl, Kiyosawa Kiyoshi illustrated this
premise by emphasizing the significance of the Modern Girl’s protruding
buttocks. He noted that the traditional function of the sash or obi (“to hide
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Japanese Modern Sites
the behind”) had been abandoned by the Modern Girl, who wore her obi
high. This preoccupation with the clothing of the Modern Girl also confirms
Rosalind Coward’s thesis that “women’s bodies, and the messages which
clothes can add, are the repository of the social definitions of sexuality.” According to Kataoka Teppei, the Modern Girl’s simple hairstyle was the outcome of a strategic decision to facilitate violent hugging, and her boldly colored and patterned clothing expressed her attraction to the fleshly vitality
exuded by the Westerner. This Modern Girl went after the physical pleasures of love (ren’ai), which meant that she sought “fleshly” stimuli in flirtation, an activity that had spread from the United States to England,
France, and Japan. (The author code-switched twice, bracketing “flirtation”
in English after he had transliterated it into katakana, the Japanese syllabary reserved for imported terms.) The Modern Girl was flirting, the author explained, when she went for a shoulder or a hand in a crowded train,
and then pulled back protesting with a polite “Oh, excuse me—it was just
that it was oh so crowded,” when her motions were met with anger. This
mixed message was also projected in dance halls and theaters, where the licentious Modern Girl went after men’s physical rather than spiritual
beauty.7
The Modern Girl was ero personified. For Kataoka, as for other male
writers, to talk about the Modern Girl’s body and clothing, and thereby her
sexuality, was to underscore her promiscuity. In contrast, the feminist journalist and critic Kitamura Kaneko, in an essay called “Strange Chastity,” defended the Modern Girl, pointing out the obvious double standard in the
public outcry at women’s indiscretions. For a woman to have played around
with a man was considered bad, but if there were women who had transgressed with men, there must have been men who had played around with
women. Kitamura refused to define the Modern Girl as sexual transgressor.
Like Kiyosawa, who saw women as moving closer to men spiritually and
physically, and like Kataoka, who celebrated new, separate cultures for men
and women and claimed that gender distinctions were based on the differing attitudes toward love held by men and women, she accepted that what
it meant to be feminine and what it meant to be masculine were being called
into question.8
The intimate relationship between efforts to conceptualize the Modern
Girl and the cultural reconstruction of gender is made clear in a section of
Kiyosawa’s essay “Man’s Education and Woman’s Education.” According to
the author, gender differentiation in Japan during the 1920s began at birth,
as baby girls were put into red kimono and baby boys were swaddled in kimono decorated with images of the mythical peach-boy Momotaro. At age
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six or seven, the boy child was reprimanded for the unmanly behavior of
crying with the rebuke “What is this—and you a boy . . . “ By the time the
boy and girl were adults, they had been educated for entirely different societies; they were like two races separated by a broad river, living according
to differing moral standards. Kiyosawa gave the Modern Girl’s resolution
to this predicament: let the boy and girl start at the same place.
Although the bold gestures of the Modern Girl crossed gender boundaries, they were, according to her creators, unquestionably female. Her cultural identity, however, was less certain. Nii had begged the issue in his
“Contours of the Modern Girl,” when he claimed that European ways had
been integrated into daily life in Japan while simultaneously refusing to
equate the Modern Girl with her Japanese sisters. Kiyosawa also separated
the Modern Girls of Europe and the United States from the Japanese Modern Girl. Whereas both sets of Modern Girls stood “in the vanguard of a
changing age in order to battle old customs,” the author feared that this had
not actually been the original goal of the Japanese version. Her short hair
might not in fact be an emblem of resistance, but the “mark of decadence”
of a woman still content to live by the actions and decisions of men.9
Was the Japanese Modern Girl Japanese? Europeanized? Cosmopolitan?
To the artist Kishida Ryusei, who defined the short-haired Modern Girl by
her body, clothing, and rapid gait on Ginza, she was all of the above.
Kishida’s formulation was consistent with Kon Wajiro’s findings that only
1 percent of women wore Western clothing. He noted that while the Modern Girl appeared for the most part in Japanese-style clothing, the face of
this beauty, originally that of a Japanese female, had been harmonized to become, in a most natural fashion, a Western-style face. But the Modern Girl
was not indulging in the forced Europeanization of an earlier era. Kishida
concluded that, instead, she was part of a process whereby “all material civilization would . . . inevitably Europeanize Japan.” Japan was not to lose its
identity; only after it had been thoroughly Europeanized could Japanese
culture become non-European.10
An alternative resolution to the ambiguity in the cultural identity of the
Modern Girl was embodied in Naomi, the polymorphously perverse heroine of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s fictional Chijin no Ai (A fool’s love), whose exploits were serialized in the Osaka Asahi Shinbun and Josei in 1924 and
1925. In the story, a nondescript young engineer becomes obsessed by the
body and costuming of his child bride, whom he has rescued from her labors
as a café waitress. As Naomi’s body and desires mature, he is overwhelmed
by her sexuality and both confused and enticed by her constantly shifting
persona, which challenges fixed notions of gender and culture.11
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Naomi’s bold transgressions across gender and culture boundaries
identify her as a Modern Girl and illustrate Coward’s explication of how social definitions of both female and male sexuality are projected onto
women’s bodies, whereas men are “neutral.” Naomi’s play with the confines
of gender identity, expressed by cross-dressing, is transformed into a power
play involving the final shift in a mistress-slave relationship. By the end of
the story, the heroine has adopted male language to challenge the authority of her former mentor. In response, her husband’s speech does not become feminized, in a role reversal, but rather infantilized: he responds to her
demands that he do whatever she desires of him with the acquiescent,
monosyllabic grunt of a domesticated male child.12
Naomi’s chief desire is to act and look Western, an aspiration at first encouraged by her mentor, who calls his Mary Pickford look-alike protégée a
Yankee Girl. Although her upward mobility into ballroom society of the ostensibly genteel dance hall challenges class distinctions, and her affectation
of male speech threatens the narrator, her appearance as a Westerner who
is not Western (captured in the ambiguity of her untraceable name,
“Naomi,” which appears Eurasian but may not be) is her most militant
statement. Naomi’s identification with Pickford, Gloria Swanson, and Pola
Negri remains titillating only as long as the hero is attracted to the haikara
(fashionable and Western-influenced) lifestyle, which is epitomized in the
“culture house” chosen by the young couple for its Western architecture
and because it is furnished with imported goods aimed at a “simple life.” In
the end, however, the hero is drawn back to a “pure” Japanese-style house
and to traditional notions of marriage and family. The ballroom dancing
scenes prove to be battle sites of East-West confrontation, Naomi appears
as an unrecognizable apparition in whiteface, and the author’s real concern
turns out to be his discomfort with anything that “smells” Western and
therefore threatens the authentic Japanese family. Tanizaki projected this
fear onto a Modern Girl who in fact wins out over the hero’s desire to return to tradition.13
While journalists grappled with the Modern Girl’s purported sexual activity, her gender identity, and her cultural identification, like Tanizaki, they
were almost unanimous in proclaiming her unquestionable autonomy.
Charges of promiscuity leveled against the Modern Girl, according to Kitamura, stemmed from the new, public nature of women’s activity. She
summed up these charges in a composite sketch:
She went for a walk with a man in Nara Park; I spotted a glimpse of her
at a Dotonbori café; she was kicking up her heels at the dance hall; I discovered her going into the movies. When I watched her walking she
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was moving her left and right legs one after the other; I saw her yawning and decided she was tired out from waiting for a man; she’d decorated her hat with a flower—I wonder who she got it from. She
sneezed, she must be run down from being with a man; etc.; etc.; etc.;
etc.; etc.; etc.; etc.14
Kitamura noted that whereas sins are committed in the dark, the so-called
disgraceful conduct of the Modern Girl was conducted in broad daylight.
The Japanese woman was no longer secluded in the confines of the household but was out in the open, working and playing alongside men. This was
her real transgression: she would not accept the division of labor that had
placed her in the home.15
The trumpeted promiscuity of the Modern Girl who moved from man
to man, was thus but one aspect of her self-sufficiency. She appeared to be
a free agent without ties of filiation, affect, or obligation to lover, father,
mother, husband, or children—in a striking counterpoint to the state ideology of family documented in the Civil Code and in the ethics texts taught
in the schools. According to one critic, the Modern Girl had not simply
abandoned motherhood: she was anti-motherhood. Even Hiratsuka Raicho,
the feminist theorist of the World War I era, agreed. Although she portrayed
the Modern Girl as the daughter of the New Woman and as someone who
had the power to create the future through her thought, emotion, action,
and everyday life, Raicho did not imagine the Modern Girl having any
daughters of her own.16
The autonomy of the Modern Girl who “strutted down the street” en
route to and from work derived from her economic self-sufficiency. Kataoka
surmised that the term Modern Girl had originated as a substitute for the
vague label of “that sort of woman” that had been attached to the urban
working women employed by stores and businesses after World War I. Kitamura warned that “it would be problematic to mistake the short skirts and
the ability to endure chilled legs as the be-all and end-all of the Modern
Girl,” because the work and the morals of this “new working woman” differed from those of the “old household woman.” According to Kitamura, the
Modern Girl’s financial independence positioned her beyond the reach of
state and family: “Since the old morals have been broken and new morals
have not yet come about and new standards of chastity have not been established, working women, in their system of thought, are a nomadic people.
Nomadic people have neither laws nor national borders. All they can do is
move as their convictions move them.”17
When Kon Wajiro took on the study of the Modern Girl, his focus was
the way she moved in urban space. Another modernologist, Koike Tomihisa,
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focused on the body, clothing, and autonomy of the Modern Girl in “The
Moga Walking Course through the Maru Building,” published in the journal Moderunologio. This brief study, which aimed to answer the philosophical question “What is a Modern Girl?” offered a complex typology of
Modern Girls; nine examples of the Modern Girls moved through urban
space. Only the first of the nine examples of Modern Girls, the “moga type,”
had a rendezvous with a male. The others—the rich young woman outfitted in a vivid orange, the type dressed in kimono, the full-bodied Modern
Girl wearing a hat decorated with a tulip, the office worker, the schoolgirl,
the Modern Girl in purple dress and purple stockings rushing away from
friends, the “schoolteacher moga,” and the housewife (?!) in modern kimono outfit with stylish parasol—had all created their own “walking
courses.” The author provided a sketch for each figure and a map of the chosen route for each. While he did express an interest in body language (the
fourteen- or fifteen-year-old school girl in the green raincoat, for example,
is swinging a package in a lively fashion), it was the movement of the Modern Girls to, from, and into the various shops in this most modern of office
buildings, that intrigued him. The shopping and window-shopping he made
note of; the freedom to look and to buy in public were implied.18
Although Tanizaki’s Naomi also remains a consumer whose appetite for
moving pictures and carefully chosen foreign and domestic order-in delicacies is matched only by her desire for a large assortment of male companions, the Modern Girl, according to many accounts, was not merely a passive consumer of middle-class culture, for she was depicted as producing
goods, services, and new habits. She thereby differed from the so-called New
Woman of the previous era, who had exhibited resistance to outmoded traditions but had offered no new model for an everyday life. The cerebral New
Woman had been romantic rather than realistic; she had wielded ideals, not
economics; she had imitated male habits instead of attempting to create a
separately bounded life for women. In contrast, the Modern Girl was more
interested in shaping the materiality of everyday existence. It cannot be emphasized too much that the Modern Girl was not “just looking,” to employ
Rachel Bowlby’s evocative term for the commodified woman who is at the
same time a customer in a newly rationalized consumer culture. While most
accounts pictured her as a street-smart flaneuse, looking over men and store
windows on Ginza, some recognized that her everyday was as much shaped
by production as it was by consumption. Such authors agreed that this selfsufficient successor to the New Woman was definitely in the vanguard of
the new modern age—the post-earthquake era of economic, social, and cultural reconstruction. There was also a general consensus that this “free-
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living and free-thinking” Modern Girl was making history in part because
she was making her own money.19
There were, of course, dissenters, like the Marxist feminist Yamakawa
Kikue. In “Modern Girls, Modern Boys,” Yamakawa depicted the Modern
Girl as a passive figure who lay supine on a beach and afterwards strolled
through town, still clad in her bathing suit. Although she disagreed with the
right-wing press reports that the Modern Girl and Modern Boy (who could
be found Ginza-cruising or at the movies or theater) were part of a communist conspiracy to weaken the children of the privileged through dissipation, she concurred with the notion that the behavior of these girls, who
painted themselves in bright colors and walked half-naked beside boys in
kettle-shaped hats and flared pants, was reminiscent of the antics of the “degenerate customs and the ephemeral epicureanism” of functionaries in the
closing years of the feudal era in Japan. Their lack of interest in anything but
sensual pleasures signified a ruling class in decline. Here was another indictment of the eroticism of the Modern Girl.20
Yamakawa’s prurient definition, which was consistent with the inability
of early-twentieth-century Marxism to come to terms with questions of
gender or sexuality, ignored the ambiguities and contradictions present in
representations of the Japanese-but-Western Modern Girl. In contrast,
other writers did attempt to reconcile images of gleeful consumerism and
sexual play with the identity of the Modern Girl as a wage-earner who, having abandoned confining tradition, exhibited strains of resistance. These
writers resorted to a twofold definition, determining that there were Modern Girls, and then there were real Modern Girls. According to Kiyosawa,
the real Modern Girl lived outside Japan, whereas the Japanese Modern Girl
was a colorful but apolitical and anti-intellectual imitation. In “One Hundred Percent Moga,” Oya Soichi offered three versions of the Modern Girl.
The first was crafty, manipulative, and intellectualizing. She was free to go
out, even to sleep out, and maintained no boundaries between friends and
lovers. She was a consumer, not a producer; she was like a mannequin. The
second type was group-oriented, productive, and possessed of a selfconsciousness. But only the third girl was “one hundred percent moga.” She
was identified as the daughter of heroic leftist activists who had been imprisoned countless times; she thus had no sense of family other than the police, the jails, and the streets. Liberated from the traditions of so-called female morality, she articulated the authentic language, gestures, and
ideology of the new era.21
Hiratsuka Raicho’s idealized version of the heroine appeared in the essay
“The Modern Girl as She Should Be.” According to Raicho, there were two
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versions of this heroine. The first was a young woman with the time and
money to fashion herself a brightly colored ensemble of Western clothing
with matching hat for frequenting the cafés on Ginza. This seemingly liberated woman, however, was not free. She was the object of men’s physical
desires, and, while she might appear upbeat, she was in fact depressed. The
real Modern Girl, in contrast, had a social conscience. Although Hiratsuka
could not find such a Modern Girl in Japan in the 1920s, she predicted that
such women would appear not from among the “fashion slaves” but from
within the ranks of working and laboring proletarian women who had organized as “social women.” The model for such a modern woman was Takamure Itsue, the anarchist feminist.22
In sum, the discourse on the Modern Girl was more about imagining a
new Japanese woman than about documenting social change. For this reason, as Kataoka Teppei admitted, despite repeated themes, there was no
clearly defined image:
When we say the Modern Girl exists in our era we are not in particular
referring to individuals named Miss So-and-so-ko or Mrs. Such-andsuch-e. Rather, we are talking about the fact that somehow, from the
midst of the lives of all sorts of women of our era, we can feel the air of
a new era, different from that of yesterday. That’s right; where can you
folks clearly say there is a typical Modern Girl? That is to say that the
Modern Girl is but a term that abstractly alludes to one new flavor
sensed from the air of the life of all women in society.23
The Modern Girl resisted definition, but this did not mean that pundits
did not keep trying to confine her. In the January 1928 issue of Shincho
(New tide), although the members of a roundtable discussion on various
facets of modern life agreed to talk about urbanization and new forms of
“articulation, expression, language, gestures, writing, and clothing,” they
could not set aside the topic of the Modern Girl: they were obsessed by the
desire to enclose her in one all-encompassing definition. These critics determined the following about the moga: (l) she was not hysterical; (2) she
used direct language; (3) she had a direct, aggressive sexuality—she checked
to see whether a man was compatible; (4) she scoffed at chastity—changing
men, for her, was like putting on a clean white shirt; (5) she could be poor,
for clothing was now inexpensive; (6) she was liberated from the double fetters of class and gender; (7) she was an anarchist; (8) she accosted men when
she needed train fare; (9) she had freedom of expression, which she got from
the movies; and finally, in an indirect commentary on the autonomy of this
persona, they pronounced that her presumed counterpart, the mobo, was a
“zero.”24
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The women writers of Nyonin Geijutsu (Women’s arts), the journal for
and by women that appeared with rare exception from July 1928 through
June 1932, did not use the term “Modern Girl,” but their unabashed celebration of female creativity, sexuality, and autonomy was a potent contribution to the process of representing and thereby defining the Modern Girl
and her eroticism in a positive light. The magazine, advertised by wellheeled live mannequins at major shopping intersections, was premised on
the shrewd analysis that media manipulation of women could be subverted
through mass marketing of a self-consciously glossy journal produced by
women cultural revolutionaries.
The tone of the journal was set on June 20, 1928, the day before the first
issue appeared, when the leading women thinkers of the day, some in kimono and some in Western dress, seated themselves at the Rainbow Grill
in Ueno and invited the press to photograph them. (The women, conscious
of the power of self-representation, had adopted the Japanese male tradition
of launching political and intellectual projects in semiprivate environs but
had chosen a more modern and less sex-specific site than a geisha house.)
The agenda for the new magazine was set in the inaugural issue in a manifesto by Yamakawa Kikue titled “An Examination of Feminism.” Yamakawa
placed women’s culture in the context of economic advances and women’s
demands for equality in suffrage, education, and work. These demands for
autonomy constituted yet another rephrasing of the discourse on the Modern Girl’s creation of her own separate and unprecedented daily life by a
woman who was representing herself as a producer of culture.25
The writers for Nyonin Geijutsu denied boundaries erected in our histories (and in those of their own Japanese political culture) by proving that
women on the left could unite to construct a multifaceted critique of
woman’s place. Such writers as Sata Ineko, whose sympathies lay with the
Japanese Communist Party, and the non-Communist but avowedly Marxist Yamakawa Kikue joined with the anarchist Yagi Akiko and numerous
other female (and a few male) writers, poets, and critics to demand a cultural
space in which women would not be treated like the live mannequins who
had just appeared on Ginza. (In an article about these women, who were
placed in department store show windows as if they were themselves for
sale, Yagi called this new job the most extreme example of the commodification of a human being as an item for sale.)26
Nyonin Geijutsu used the weapons of the numerous magazines produced for mass circulation during the late 1920s—pictures and photographs, fiction, theoretical essays, and roundtable discussions—and drew on
both indigenous and foreign sources to champion women’s liberation. Un-
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like male intellectuals, who were nervous about the cultural identity of the
Modern Girl, these writers made no attempt to distinguish “authentic Japanese” experience from imitations of the West. In addition to articles on Edo
life and on domestic politics, the journal included writings by such thinkers
as Alexandra Kollontai (whose works were causing a great sensation in
Japan owing to rumors that they advocated free love), Katherine Mansfield,
Bronislaw Malinowski, and Langston Hughes.27
The writers for Nyonin Geijutsu talked about more than just art and
theory. The women’s magazines of the 1920s featured articles on love and
romance, and so too did Nyonin Geijutsu, in a series of pieces published in
its earliest issues. One representative discussion was the “Roundtable Discussion of Other Angles on Love.” The fourteen women participants in the
event, which was subtitled “Feelings and Sensations of Jealousy; Chastity
and Love, Adulterous Love; The Eternal Nature of Love; Love in a Threesided Affair and in a Multi-sided Affair; Sexual Desire and Love,” were
tough, cynical, and, like the Modern Girl represented in the media, realistic. The political activist Kamichika Ichiko questioned whether strong feelings leading to a marriage based on love could last fifty years into the marriage. Love was well and good, she noted, if one had the time, but she was
busy with her family and her work; there was no time for the cultivation of
love. Another discussant claimed that only unrequited love was eternal.28
Unlike the imagined Modern Girl, the modern women on the panel were
confronting actual issues of bonding, relating, and reproducing. Significantly, in the process of defining the militant as a Modern Girl, these
women, like so many of the women who appeared in Nyonin Geijutsu as either writers or the subjects of articles, defined themselves as out in public
as workers. They openly expressed their feelings about both love and work.
Although they may have eschewed the label “Modern Girl,” the sentiment
that women should move out of the household and into the streets was familiar to the readers of Nyonin Geijutsu. An example is available in the
large-print ad promoting a nationwide contest for the best lyrics for a
“Women’s March” in 1929. The title of the song might recall the “Tokyo
March” of the same year, but it was clear that the editors were looking for
a differently coded shift in sentiment. Theirs was a militant call to women
of all classes to move forward, into the streets: “Women have already kicked
off their heavy shackles and escaped from the dungeons of their darkened
hearts. What lies before us now is for us to pour into the streets like rain in
a sun-shower. What is left is the deafening roar of the factories, the tips of
the spires of thought attacking the heavens. Lining up with all peoples we
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move forward into the world of all living things. Friends, at times like these
we need a song that will sing, exhort, exalt, and push forward for us.”29
The image of a Modern Girl on the road was also publicized in “Letters
from a Trip to Kyushu,” coauthored by Yagi Akiko and Hayashi Fumiko (the
latter’s Horoki [Tale of wandering], the sensational “diary” of the travels of
a working woman spurred by desire, was currently being serialized in Nyonin Geijutsu). The travelogue opened with Yagi’s expression of concern over
Hayashi’s drinking. Hayashi, in turn, boasted of the romance and whiskey
she had enjoyed with a “tall, modern” fan in Nagoya, and of her behavior
toward the soldier on the train whom she had pinched so as to terminate
moves that were not fast enough. This document about wine, men, and
song—an update of Tokaido Hizakurige, the Edo classic about the picaresque antics of two déclassé warriors—produced by two women writers on
the road, proved that adventure was not gender-bound. In other words,
Hayashi Fumiko, the lusty author-heroine of Tale of Wandering, who was
busy punctuating her autobiographical account of a down-and-out woman
drifter with such fragments as a lyrical reference to dancing naked women,
was not an idiosyncratic anomaly. The Modern Girl’s protest, expressed
through sensuality and mobility, could be communal, like the trip taken by
the two modern women.30
But Nyonin Geijutsu was not all about art, love, and exploration. Class
consciousness made itself increasingly evident as articles on women factory
workers, and especially on labor in the Soviet Union, increased in later issues. For the last six months that Nyonin Geijutsu appeared, the magazine
contained a series on the notorious Toyo muslin strike of 1930. This strike
also produced fictional heroines, in a series of short stories published by Sata
Ineko in 1931, a year after Sata had stood in support outside the factory
walls, listening to the sound of the strike drums. Her four-part narrative,
which appeared in diverse sources in the mass media, recounted violence
both among the young women workers and between the women and the
hired thugs of the “justice corps.” Sata’s documentary fiction also presented
a montage of propaganda produced by both sides, including letters appealing to the power of patriarchy, addressed to the women’s fathers and brothers from the factory management.31
Like Tanizaki’s Chijin no Ai and Hayashi Fumiko’s montage-like Tale of
Wandering, which juxtaposed poetry with autobiography and superimposed autobiography onto fiction, Sata’s stories presented the militant as a
Modern Girl guilty of transgressing in both spoken language and body language. In her stories, class struggle, rather than the definition of a modern
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culture, is at stake when the teenage activists refuse to stay in their designated place as obedient workers. These young women take to the streets, but
not to dance, shop, or strut to work. Instead, they brawl with an enthusiasm
equal to that of their male cohorts. They code-switch, using the rough male
word for “I,” ore, to refer to themselves; they threaten to smash dishes; and
they wrestle—literally—over issues of ideology. The fighting and the new
way of talking are modern gestures. And while these young women do express sexual desires, like the Modern Girls in the media, by taking time to
flirt with male coworkers, this is clearly a secondary pastime. Flirtation is a
pleasurable diversion from their abiding concern—their desire is that they
be allowed to continue to produce. Above all, they want to work.
What emerges from the varied commentary on the Modern Girl is that
men and women writers for the popular press believed that this cultural
heroine was defining her own options and her own sexuality (along with the
sexuality of the mobo). This modern young woman transgressed boundaries of class, gender, and culture. Her resistance was usually not organized,
but nevertheless it was political: as observers like Kiyosawa acknowledged,
as distinct from her predecessors in the Japanese women’s movement, the
Modern Girl, “like the grand waves of the Pacific Ocean,” drew those
around her into her activity. She had neither a leader nor an organization,
but hers was the first nationally based movement of women; hers was the
first voice of woman’s resistance.32
The Modern Girl, in other words, was militant. The only article in Nyonin Geijutsu with the term “Modern Girl” in its title is one that hints at this
equation of women’s transgressions across class, sex, and culture lines with
political action. The heroine of this brief commentary, “The Modern Girl in
Jail,” is imprisoned for soliciting funds for an after-hours school for working girls. When she is placed in a cell with other women, her “crime” is not
distinguished from their petty criminal acts. They are all, the article concludes, political prisoners.33
Although interviews with survivors of the Toyo muslin strike indicate
that the street fighting did not last long, because the girls could not hold out
against the strength of the state-backed company, the image of the strikers
as street-fighting women has persisted. The same cannot be said for the
Modern Girl. The unattached, militant woman who publicly expressed her
desires for sex and for work in public places, thereby challenging the assumption that she belonged in the home, has vanished. An interrogation of
what modern young working women did—along with an inquiry into what
they were expected to do—contributes to an explanation of both the ap-
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pearance and the disappearance of this pugnacious and lustful multifaceted
heroine.34
what did she do?
In order to begin to explain why this Modern Girl did what she did, when
she did, we must associate her representation with a history of Japanese
women of the 1920s and 1930s that sees women as consumers, producers,
legal subjects, and political activists. The Modern Girl appeared during a historical juncture when Japanese women were acting in all of these capacities.35
Talk about the Modern Girl’s clothed (and disrobed) body cannot be divorced from documented social change in women’s material culture during
the 1920s. Magazine articles devoted to sewing Western-style clothes, for
example, suggest a shift toward non-Japanese dress. The magazine Shufu no
Tomo (its reassuring title translates as Friend of the Housewife) which was
aimed at the housebound married woman, had run its first series on making Western clothing in 1917, and by 1923 such articles as “How to Make a
Convenient House-Dress” were promoting Western attire as a stylish
commodity. Nevertheless, the daughter of the poet Hagiwara Sakutaro recalled how neighborhood housewives had jeered, “Modern Girl!” when her
mother—inspired by the author Uno Chiyo—first appeared in Western
clothing in 1927. It would appear that many were not as quick to accept new
fashions as they were to make use of a new media label.36
The social history of the affective lives of actual young Japanese women
during the 1920s is even more difficult to recount. Were young women in
fact as animated and promiscuous as they appeared in the claims of Nii and
others who suggested that the Modern Girl’s gestures mirrored movie imagery? To what extent did the bravado of the women intellectuals in Nyonin
Geijutsu reflect the assertive attitudes toward sex and the opposite sex reported in the media? One recorded exchange between a man and a woman
on a commuter train in 1930 provides an illustration of brazen behavior that
matches the accusations of critics who caught (or lauded) the Modern Girl
accosting helpless men: a woman of about thirty riding on a train was accused, by a well-dressed stranger, of acting shamelessly for a wife and of
threatening the national good, because her permanent wave was “no good”
and her powder too thick. The woman’s reaction was immediate and relentless. “Excuse me, but how do you know whether or not I’m someone’s
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wife?” she retorted. She then demanded his business card, threatened to
visit his house that very day, and followed him off the train when he attempted to retreat.37
As noted by the witness to this incident, the woman was undoubtedly en
route to the Marubiru, the office building in the financial district of Tokyo
famous for its female clerical workers in Western dress. Beginning in 1923,
these workers, the subjects of Kon’s examination of the moga’s walking
course, could have their hair permed at Japan’s first beauty parlor. According to contemporary sources, by 1924 women constituted 3,500 of the
30,000 white-collar workers commuting to the Marunouchi district. By the
second half of the 1920s, approximately 8,200 women were employed at
secretarial and service jobs in Japan’s urban centers.38
During the 1920s, at the same time that the Modern Girl was being defined, journalists and state officials were surveying working women
(shokugyo fujin). A comparison of the six categories used in the 1924 “Survey regarding Working Women,” one of the many surveys released by the
Tokyo Social Affairs Bureau, with the categories used in “A Modern Girl
Mental Test,” published in Fujokai (Woman’s world), reveals that the discourse on the Modern Girl and the response to the working woman were
part of the same social and economic history. Whereas the six headings used
by the Tokyo officials were teachers, typists, office workers, storekeepers,
nurses, and telephone operators, the “Mental Test” had also included bus
conductors, café waitresses, and urban women producers of services who
could not be classified as middle-class and who came from working-class
backgrounds. Although the term shokugyo fujin was usually used to distinguish white-collar women employees from their sisters in the factories,
the meaning of “working woman” remained ambiguous. As late as 1932, a
commentator who had read several works on the “working woman problem” in order to put the café waitress in a sociological perspective still could
not find a concept to fit the label. Kon Wajiro’s typology of the working
woman in his 1929 New Edition of the Guide to Greater Tokyo also illustrated the blurring of class distinctions when he included in his list women
bus conductors, chauffeurs, company representatives, journalists, office
workers, shop clerks, and gasoline girls, women who handed out advertisements and matchbooks, elevator girls (newly being paid), and the mannequins, who had first appeared in 1928 and were now found even in the
provinces.39
A living counterpart to the imaginary Modern Girl emerges from these
various surveys. She is a single or married Japanese woman wage-earner
who was forced into paid employment by financial need following the end
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of the economic boom of the World War I years. The omnipresent workingclass café waitress in novels and stories of the late 1920s and early 1930s
therefore represents the Modern Girl’s true identity better than the figure
of an aimless, mindless consumer frequently found in our history textbooks.40
The representation of the Modern Girl as free from family obligations
had an actual social corollary. The struggle of Tanizaki’s hero to redefine his
marriage with Naomi occurred at a time when scholars and state officials,
in response to the emergence of the “small” nuclear family, were actively
considering the reconstitution of the modern Japanese family. Commentators on the Modern Girl have all ignored the fact that the discourse on this
threatening woman reached its height just when the government was debating revision of the Civil Code, having recognized that the “law ignoring
women,” as Oku Mumeo had called it, was not working. Inasmuch as the
denial of civic responsibility to women had been premised not on biological
determinism but on a notion of the woman’s proper place within the family, changes in family life resulting from women’s newly expanded economic roles appeared to call for an institutionalized ideological shift. By
1924, faced with the rise of wife-initiated divorce in urban Japan, pundits
were lamenting the destruction of the family. By 1925, proposals challenging key provisions of the Civil Code, which in 1898 had granted full power
to the male head of the household, were under active consideration by the
Rinji Hosei Shingikai, a special investigative committee established in 1919
to revise the family provisions of the Meiji Civil Code. Women’s competence was acknowledged in the proposed changes that would seemingly
eliminate the requirement of parental consent to a marriage, make divorce
easier for women, expand the parental rights of women, and grant women
the right to manage their own property.41
The notoriety of the Modern Girl thus corresponded historically with a
change in state policy on women’s position within the family. An equally
important historical conjuncture was the simultaneous appearance of the
ostensibly apolitical Modern Girl and of political groups for women. The
displacement of the term “husband-wife quarrel” (fufugenka) by the more
evocative “household struggle” (katei sogi) around this time indicates the
extent to which family reality belied state ideology in the 1920s and corroborates Sharon Nolte’s suggestion that various interrelated political “configurations” during the interwar years might have served “to form a collective impression of rising politicization among women.”42
Increasingly, there was political mobilization of women by women. Numerous militant feminist organizations emerged during the 1920s after the
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establishment of the liberal Shin Fujin Kyokai (New Woman’s Association)
in 1919 and Sekirankai (the Red Wave Society), the first Japanese socialist
woman’s organization, in 1921. In 1922, the ban on women attending political meetings was lifted. The Fusen Kakutoku Domei (League for
Women’s Suffrage) was well established by 1925, and, as a result of the establishment of left-wing political parties following the promulgation of universal male suffrage in that year, auxiliary women’s associations, such as the
Kanto Women’s Federation of the Labor-Farmer Party, came into being.
Women were also active in both the radical and moderate wings of the labor
movement; in the tenancy movement; in the Fujin Shohi Kumiai Kyokai
(Organization of Women’s Consumer Unions), established in 1928; and in
such professional organizations as the Taipisuto Kyokai (Association of Typists), the Shokugyo Fujinsha (Society of Working Women), which published
its own journal, Shokugyo Fujin (Working woman); and the Mannequin
Club, organized by Yamano Chieko in 1929, six years after the opening of
her beauty parlor in the Marunouchi Building. By April 1922, the Advertising Corps of the Federation of Café Waitresses had sent union members
into the streets of Osaka. More than twenty young waitresses traveled
through the streets of Osaka in five automobiles, paying visits to major
newspapers, handing out more than twenty thousand flyers calling for solidarity. Waving their banners, they quoted the opening words of Hiratsuka
Raicho’s feminist manifesto, reminding their audience that “in the beginning woman was the sun” and calling for women of the world to unite.43
The struggle of working women was as multifaceted as the Modern
Girl’s many guises, and women’s political engagement during the 1920s also
took numerous forms. It encompassed the journalistic endeavors of activist
leaders such as Yamakawa and Hiratsuka, the organization of lectures, the
lobbying of state officials, the formation of study groups dedicated to
women’s issues, the establishment of schools to educate proletarian women,
and the use of leaflets and tea parties to influence politics. Women workers
also took organized action over such issues as the woman worker’s freedom
to leave her dormitory to go into the streets. By the end of 1928, 12,010
women had joined the labor movement; women had been solely responsible for twenty-one labor actions and had participated in 138 of the 397 labor
struggles of the year. The Toyo muslin strike of 1930 was one of 329 instances of labor strife in which women were active participants. The Florida
Dance Hall strike of the same year, one of the thirty-eight strikes organized
solely by women in 1930, illustrates how class conflict took place not only
on the factory floor, but also in the play spaces where working women
served consumers.44
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what made the modern girl do what she did?
The Modern Girl is rescued from her free-floating and depoliticized state
when her willful image is placed alongside the history of working, militant
Japanese women. Then the obsessive contouring of the Modern Girl as
promiscuous and apolitical (and, later, as apolitical and nonworking) can be
understood as a means of displacing the very real militancy of Japanese
women (just as the real labor of the American woman during the 1920s was
denied by the trivializing of the work of the glamorized flapper). But
whereas the American woman worker by the mid-1920s had allowed herself to be depoliticized by a new consumerism, the modern Japanese woman
of the 1920s was truly militant. Her militancy was articulated through the
adoption of new fashions, through labor in new arenas, and through political activity that consciously challenged social, economic, and political structures and relationships. The Japanese state’s response encompassed attempts to revise the Civil Code, consideration of universal suffrage,
organization and expansion of groups such as the Fujin Doshikai (Women’s
Alliance) and the nationwide network of shojokai (associations of young
girls), censorship, and imprisonment of leaders. The media responded by
producing the Modern Girl.45
Yet the Modern Girl must have represented even more, for the determination that talk about the Modern Girl displaced serious concern about the
radical nature of women’s activity does not fully account for her multivalence. Why was she both Japanese and Western, intellectual and worker, deviant and admirable? This code-switching within the discourse raises such
queries. One answer is suggested by Natalie Davis in “Women on Top,”
where she argues that the “unruly woman” in early-modern Europe, who
whored, tricked, and traded, served both to reinforce social structure and to
incite women to militant action in public and in private. The culturally constructed figure of the Japanese Modern Girl certainly did both. Like the disorderly woman on top, the Modern Girl as multivalent symbol questioned
relations of order and subordination and at the same time, through her cultural gender play and promiscuity, served “to explore the character of sexuality” and of gender while also suggesting that order be preserved.46
Of course, the Japanese Modern Girl is no more a copy of her premodern European sister than she is of her kinetic American contemporaries, but
the term namaiki, meaning cheeky, bold, or brazen, which recurs in Sata
Ineko’s prewar writings and which she would much later use in mockcritical reference to herself during interviews, is a powerful analogue to the
notion of woman as “disorderly.” The connotations of this word are not vi-
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olent, but they are certainly aggressive and transgressive: the person who
is namaiki, like the Modern Girl, dares to take liberties. The symbol of a namaiki, uppity Modern Girl, who crossed boundaries of gender, class, and
sexual mores, may indeed have spoken to those who demanded expanded
social, economic, and sexual liberation for both women and men. In this
sense, she was admirable. But, conversely, the Modern Girl did what she did
because woman’s new place in public as worker, intellectual, and political activist threatened the patriarchal family and its ideological support, the deferential woman who was presented in state ideology as the ryosai kenbo
(good wife and wise mother). Inflected in this fashion, the Modern Girl was
a threat. Finally, the Modern Girl, who was both Japanese and Western—or
possibly neither—played with the principle of cultural or national difference. Seen in this way, she highlighted the controversy over the adoption of
non-Japanese customs in everyday life and called into question the essentialism (as opposed to the European physiological determinism) that subordinated the Japanese woman to the Japanese man. This thesis was indeed
offered by the feminist Kitamura, who claimed that “labor struggle, tenancy
struggle, household struggle, and struggle between man and woman” were
inevitable and had recently been joined to a new battle: “a struggle over
good conduct” that pitted Japanese against Western behavior and used the
Modern Girl to work out the struggle.47
This, then, is the significance of the Japanese Modern Girl in the broadest context of pre–Pacific War Japanese history. The Modern Girl stood as
the vital symbol of overwhelming “modern” or non-Japanese change instigated by both women and men during an era of economic crisis and social
unrest. She stood for change at a time when state authority was attempting
to reestablish authority and stability and thus inverted the role of the good
wife and wise mother. The ideal Meiji woman of the late 1800s had served
as a “repository of the past,” standing for tradition while men were encouraged to radically change their way of politics and culture. In contrast,
the Modern Girl served critics who wanted to preserve rather than challenge traditions during a time of sweeping cultural change. The fact that
these were male critics is brought into relief by the fact that the women
writers of Nyonin Geijutsu did not bother to mull over the national identity
or cultural specificity of the Modern Girl.48
The Modern Girl as un-Japanese and therefore criminal was the real subtext to such headlines as “Modern Girls Swept Out of Ministry of Railroads,” and “Conquering the Moga and Mobo.” In 1925, a “vanguard
moga” in short hair and Western clothing was tried for murdering a delinquent foreigner with whom she had been consorting. The case, which re-
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ceived sensational press coverage, illustrated both sexual and cultural transgression. This story and others like it served a dual function: they registered
unease with non-Japanese customs and at the same time denied the political activity of Japanese women. The Modern Girl’s crime, in other words,
was packaged as a culturally colored crime of passion; it was not a politically
motivated thought crime. Thus, a father in the 1920s could beg his leftist
son to “become a Modern Boy or even a Modern Girl” (!) as long as he did
not “go red.”49
One of the most graphic examples of the Modern Girl as cultural transgressor, and one that signaled an end to her prominence, was presented in a
series of ink drawings constituting a history of Japanese mores in different
years of the modern era, published in the pages of Chuo Koron (Central review) in 1932. In the first image, in a reference to Meiji society, two women
in kimono gossip under a parasol, and men in Western military garb drive
behind them in a horse and carriage. The following five sketches (with only
one small exception) elaborate on a demure figure in kimono. Only in the
image standing for 1932, does one of the four figures wear Western dress; a
second reclines decadently on a chaise lounge, and a third sits with her legs
spread and her elbows exposed. It is, however, the illustration accompanying the title of this piece that best reveals the intensity with which tradition
was being defended. Alongside the painterly calligraphy of the title is a
woman in kimono sheathed in fur; above her head is a large gun, pointed at
the characters for “modern traditions.”50
The Modern Girl stood for a contemporary woman, but, like Tanizaki’s
Naomi, she also represented threats to tradition, just as the good wife and
wise mother had stood for the endurance of tradition: To talk about the
Modern Girl was to talk about women on the street, militant and otherwise,
but it was also to talk about modernity. During the 1920s, her defenders,
who saw her at the vanguard of a new imperial reign—the Showa era—
were optimistic. One, who placed her appearance at 1926, saw the Modern
Girl evolving toward complete fulfillment. This journalist predicted that future historians writing the history of prewar men and women in Japan
would call the year when the term modan gaaru appeared in magazines and
newspapers “1 a.d.” By the beginning of the Pacific War, however, boundaries reifying gender and culture (and denying class) were imposed: laws
forbade women to dress in men’s clothing, women’s magazines were placed
under tight controls, and supposed vestiges of Western decadence, including permanent waves, were outlawed. And although the Modern Girl reappeared after the war, freed of such restrictions, she was by then reduced to
a witless mannequin.51
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The Modern Girl, whose identity was originally split into the dual images of a working woman and a middle-class adolescent at play, expressed a
new set of gestures with profound implications for social relationships.
Some of the gestures were indeed grounded in daily life, as the work of Kon
documented, but more often than not the Modern Girl represented conflicting fantasies about class, gender, and culture that were projected onto
her. She was displaced by yet another embodiment of womanhood: the Japanese woman on the home front, a good wife and wise mother characterized
by renewed ties of filiation to “tradition,” state, and patriarchy. But the
Modern Girl had made her mark. She appeared in the mass media through
the 1930s as a signifier of the modern, even as the war on the continent escalated. Her figure will recur in the following segments, in such other sites
of erotic grotesque nonsense, as the café. I see the café waitress, who was and
is usually treated separately from the Modern Girl, as one manifestation of
the Modern Girl, albeit one often far from militant.
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Notes
the modern girl as militant
1. See for example, Peter Duus, The Rise of Modern Japan (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 187–88. See the segment devoted to the Modern Girl
in “Nihon no Kokoro,” ed. Takahashi Shoji, special issue of the magazine Taiyo,
no. 54 (1986): 126–28 (the special issue is part of a series, Modan Tokyo
Hyakkei, edited by Unno Hiroshi); and the entry “Moga Mobo—Gaikoku
Kabure no Danjo Moodo,” in Meiji Taisho Fuzokugoten, ed. Tsuchida Mitsufumi (Kadokawa Shoten, 1979), 325–26. For an analysis of how the American
flapper displaced the “social mother” of the preceding era, see Mary Ryan,
Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present (New York:
Franklin Watts, 1983), 220–23.
2. The movie, directed by Suzuki Jukichi, drew unprecedented crowds when
it opened in 1930. For a discussion of its appeal, see Tanaka Jun’ichiro, ed., Musei
kara Tookii e, Nihon Eiga Hattatsushi 2 (Chuo Koronsha, 1968), 178. Nani ga
Kanojo wo so Sasetaka first appeared in the January 1927 issue of Kaizo and
was staged by the Tsukiji Theater in April of that year. I cite Fujimori Seikichi,
Nani ga Kanojo wo so Sasetaka (Kaizosha, 1927), 1–160.
3. Kitazawa Shuichi’s article is cited in Sato Takeshi, “Modanizumu to
Amerikaka: 1920, Senkyuhyaku Nijunen wo Chushin to shite” in Minami,
NMK, 41–42; Ueda Yasuo, “Josei Zasshi ga Mita Modanizumu,” in Minami,
NMK, 135–36; and Barbara Hamill, “Josei: Modanizumu to Kenri Ishiki,” in
Minami, NMK, 215–16. For a rich history of the appearance of the modern girl
see Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman, 45–78.
4. Nii Itaru, “Modan Gaaru no Rinkaku,” Fujin Koron, April 1925, 24–31.
Nii’s colleague, Oya Soichi, attributed the piece to Nii, but Nii gave credit to Kitazawa; see Hamill, “Josei,” 229.
5. Maeda Ai notes that the term modan gaaru won out over the label shin
jidai no onna (woman of the new era). See Maeda, Kindai Dokusha no Seiritsu
(Yuseido, 1972), 214–15. Ueda follows what he terms the discourse on the Modern Girl through articles published in Josei from 1924 through 1928. He cites
the cartoon series penned by Tanaka Hisara as beginning in the September 1928
issue of Shufu no Tomo; see Ueda, “Josei Zasshi,” NMK, 115–30, 127. For a commentary on the construction of the moga through the reinforcing “advertisements” of newspapers, magazines, and the movies, see Hoshino Tatsuo,
“Modaan Shinbun Zasshi Eiga Mandan,” Kaizo, June 1929, 42–45. See Minami,
SB, 303–8. Regarding the extent of national distribution, see Ie no Hikari
Kyokai, ed., Ie no Hikari Shijunen (Ie no Hikari Kyokai, 1968), 126.
I elaborate on the place of the Modern Girl in my discussion of Shufu no
Tomo as modern site in segment 4, The Household Becomes Modern Life, and
in the conclusion.
6. Kataoka Teppei, “Onna no Kyaku” in Ningen Seken, vol. 1 of Kindai
Shomin Seikatsushi (hereafter KSS), ed. Minami Hiroshi (San’ichi Shobo,
1985), 175–77 (originally published in October 1926).
7. Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, “Modaan Gaaru no Kenkyu,” Ningen Seken, vol. 1 of
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Minami, KSS, 143–58. Rosalind Coward, Female Desires: How They Are
Sought, Bought, and Packaged (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 30. This volume
offers insightful analysis associating fashion with the historical construction
and representation of the female body. Kataoka Teppei, “Modan Gaaru no
Kenkyu,” in Minami, KSS, 1:163–64, 170, 172 (originally published on September 9, 1926). It was also included in Kataoka, Modan Gaaru no Kenkyu
(Kinseido, 1927). The term ren’ai, used to translate the Western term love, was,
like the words for philosophy (tetsugaku) and society (shakai), a Meiji invention. Two Chinese characters—ren (or, in the Japanese pronunciation, koi), alluding to feelings of deep affection between a man and a woman, and ai, meaning to be drawn to something and yearn for it or feel a tenderness toward
it—were combined to create the new word, which could apply only to a yearning for a member of the opposite sex. See Tanaka Sumiko, ed., Josei Kaiho no
Shiso to Kodo, prewar vol. (Jiji Tsushinsha, 1975), 166.
8. Kitamura Kaneko, “Kai Teiso,” in Minami, KSS, 1:128–42, esp. 131–34
(originally published in 1927). Ueda, “Josei Zasshi,” in Minami, NMK, 135;
Kataoka, “Modan Gaaru no Kenkyu,” 161, 168; Kitamura, “Kai Teiso,” 133.
9. Kiyosawa cites in romanized letters a “Dr. Meyrick Booth,” published in
the “Hibert Journal.” See Kiyosawa, “Modaan Gaaru no Kenkyu,” in Minami,
KSS, 1:152, 155–57. Nii, “Modan Gaaru no Rinkaku,” 24.
10. Kishida Ryusei, “Shinko Saiku Ginza Dori,” in Kishida Ryusei Zenshu,
vol. 4 (Iwanami Shoten, 1979), 295–97. This essay was serialized in the evening
edition of the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun from May 24 through June 10, 1927.
11. Chijin no Ai was serialized in the Osaka Asahi Shinbun from March
through June 1924, and in Josei from November 1924 through July 1925; the
version cited here is from Tanizaki Jun’ichiro Zenshu (Chuo Koronsha, 1967),
10:1–302. For an English translation, see Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Naomi, trans. Anthony H. Chambers (New York: Knopf, 1985).
12. Coward, Female Desires, 30. For a passage describing how the hero poses
Naomi in various guises, and for the role reversal, see Tanizaki, Chijin no Ai, 45,
294. I am grateful to Lucy North for the concept of “mistress-slave relationship.”
13. Tanizaki chose “Yankee girl,” an unambiguously pejorative term that
implied an unthinking copying of Western mores, over “Modern Girl.” For a
discussion of the term “Yankee girl,” see Ueda, “Josei Zasshi,” in Minami,
NMK, 136–37. Tanizaki, Chijin no Ai, 126, 264. Tanizaki uses the Meiji term
haikara, derived from the transliteration of “high collar,” to mean fashionably
Western, rather than modan, or “modern.” Although it is common for scholars
to assume that haikara was displaced by modan, the use of haikara continued
until the end of the 1920s. The bunka jutaku, or “culture house,” was the term
for the Westernized homes erected for the new middle class following World
War I.
14. Kitamura, “Kai Teiso,” in Minami, KSS, 1:131.
15. Ibid.
16. As E. Patricia Tsurumi has documented, women workers in the textile
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industry constituted 71 percent of the private industry workforce by 1910, but
this social reality was not reflected in official ideology. Kano Masanao suggests
that not only have the two parts of the compound word kokka been separated
into its constitutive koku or kuni (nation) and ka or ie (family) in order to posit
an analogy between the two terms, but men have been placed within the nation
and women within the family. See E. Patricia Tsurumi, “Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Unionism in Japan,” History Workshop 18
(Fall 1984): 5; and Kano, Senzen “Ie” no Shiso (Sobunsha, 1983), 5. For the assessment that the Modern Girl was unfettered by tradition or fatalism and
“more than anything respected herself,” see the August 1924 issue of Josei
(cited in Ueda, “Josei Zasshi,” in Minami, NMK, 135). The introductory section
to the Civil Code, which explained that Japanese law differed from Western civil
codes because the familial nature of Japanese society displaced any notion of individuality, and the fourth book of the code, the Book of Relatives, placed
women in a patriarchal web. For an example of the subjugation of woman
within the family in the ethics textbooks, consider the elementary-school catechism about the loyal bride and mother-to-be who, with soft voice, engages in
her needlework and cleaning; see Suematsu Kencho, Shogaku Shushin Kan,
parts 2 and 3 (Seikasha, 1892), cited in Kazoku Mondai, ed. Yuzawa Yasuhiko,
vol. 5 of Nihon Fujin Mondai Shiryo Shusei (hereafter NFMSS) (Domesu
Shuppan, 1978), 369–70. See also Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 120–27. Hiratsuka Raicho, “Modan Gaaru ni Tsuite,” in Hiratsuka Raicho Chosakushu
(hereafter HRC), vol. 4 (Otsuki Shoten, 1983), 282–84 (originally published in
Dai Chowa, May 1927); and Hiratsuka, “Kaku Arubeki Modan Gaaru,” in HRC,
290–97 (originally published in Fujin Koron, June 1927).
17. Kitamura, “Kai Teiso,” 135, 131. Kataoka, “Modan Gaaru no Kenkyu,”
162–163.
18. Koike Tomihisa, “Marubiru Moga Sanpo Koosu,” in Kon and Yoshida,
Moderunologio, 131–37.
19. Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and
Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985), 18–34. Kiyosawa, “Modaan Gaaru no
Kenkyu,” in Minami, KSS, 1:157–58; Kataoka, “Modan Gaaru no Kenkyu,” in
Minami, KSS, 1:161–65. The notion is Kataoka’s. See Kataoka, “Modan Gaaru
no Kenkyu,” in Minami, KSS, 1:164. The terms sentan and zen’ei, meaning
vanguard and radical, were commonly applied to the Modern Girl. On this
issue, see Minami, NMK, x.
20. Unlike other writers, who either marginalized the Modern Boy or ignored him altogether, Yamakawa placed no greater emphasis on the Modern
Girl than on her male partner; see Yamakawa Kikue, “Modan Gaaru, Modan
Booi,” in Yamakawa Kikueshu, ed. Tanaka Sumiko and Yamakawa Shinsaku
(Iwanami Shoten, 1981–1982), 4:268–71 (originally published in Keizai Orai,
September 1927). Exhibiting a revolutionary optimism, Yamakawa also drew a
second parallel: the interests of the decadent girls and boys were undoubtedly
very similar to the diversions enjoyed by the Russian nobility and landowners
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who were thrown off their land by the roughened hands of the ignorant
muzhiks (ibid., 269–70).
21. Kiyosawa, “Modaan Gaaru no Kenkyu,” in Minami, KSS, 1:153–57. Oya
Soichi, “Hyaku Paasento Moga,” Oya Soichi Zenshu, 2:10–17 (originally published in Chuo Koron, August 1929). Hamill has concluded that the distinction
between a (progressive) “real Modern Girl” and a “real” Modern Girl interested
only in clothing and makeup was present in almost all accounts of the Modern
Girl; see Hamill, “Josei,” in Minami, NMK, 210.
22. Hiratsuka, “Kaku Arubeki Modan Gaaru,” in Hiratsuka, HRC, 4:290–97.
23. Kataoka, “Modan Gaaru no Kenkyu,” Minami, KSS, 1:173. The suffixes
-ko and -e are feminine endings.
24. “Modan Seikatsu Mandankai,” Shincho, January 1928, 123–47.
25. The story of the woman who committed suicide after being called a
Modern Girl may be apocryphal, but the strategic decision of these women not
to adopt the label is in part explained by Hiratsuka Raicho’s remembrance that
no woman in short hair and Western clothes would call herself a “Modern Girl,”
just as the Seitosha activists of her generation had actively resisted the label of
“New Woman”; see Hiratsuka, “Modan Gaaru ni Tsuite,” in Hiratsuka, HRC,
4:283. Ogata Akiko, Nyonin Geijutsu no Sekai (Domesu Shuppan, 1980),
38–39. Yamakawa Kikue, “Feminizumu no Kento,” in Yamakawa Kikueshu,
5:167–74 (originally published in Nyonin Geijutsu 1, no. 1 [July 1928]: 2–7).
26. Yagi Akiko, “Kotoba: Hyogen,” Nyonin Geijutsu 2, no. 1 (January 1929):
104–6. For Yamakawa Kikue’s biting critique of the commodification of women,
see Yamakawa, “Keihin tsuki Tokkahin to shite no Onna,” Yamakawa
Kikueshu, 5:2–8 (originally published in Fujin Koron, January 1928).
27. A number of Kollontai’s works were translated into Japanese between
1927 and 1936: Red Love, trans. Murao Jiro (Seikaisha, 1927); A Grand Love,
trans. Nakajima Hideko (Sekaisha, 1930); Great Love, trans. Uchiyama Kenji
(Sekaisha, 1930); Working Women’s Revolution, trans. Otake Hakukichi
(Naigaisha, 1930); Motherhood and Society, trans. Ozawa Keishi (Lo-gosu
Shoin, 1931); and Women and the Family System, trans. Yamakawa Kikue (Seibunkaku, 1936).
28. “Tahomen Ren’ai Zadankai,” Nyonin Geijutsu 1, no. 3 (September
1928): 2–22.
29. “Zen Josei Shinshutsu Koshinkyoku wo Tsunoru,” Nyonin Geijutsu 2,
no. 8 (August 1929): 2–3.
30. Yagi Akiko and Hayashi Fumiko, “Kyushu Tabidayori,” Nyonin Geijutsu 2, no. 9 (September 1929): 70–81. Horoki was serialized in nineteen installments between October 1928 and November 1930.
31. Nakamoto Takako, “Toyo Mosu Daini Kojo” (parts 1–4), Nyonin Geijutsu, July–December 1932. See Sata Ineko, “Kanbu Joko no Namida,” Kaizo,
January 1931; “Shokanbu,” Bungei Shunju, August 1931; “Kito,” Chuo Koron,
October 1931; and “Kyosei Kikoku,” Chuo Koron, January 1931; all reprinted
in Sata Ineko Zenshu (Kodansha, 1977), 1:219–78. Sata has explained that the
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women workers asked her for aid and that she had been outside the dormitory
in Kameido during the strike (my interviews with Sata Ineko, in Tokyo, October 1982, and Karuizawa, August 1986).
32. Kiyosawa, “Modaan Gaaru no Kenkyu,” in Minami, KSS, 1:158.
33. “Ryuchijo no Modan Gaaru,” Nyonin Geijutsu 2, no. 12 (December
1929): 77–81.
34. See Watanabe Etsuji and Suzuki Yuko, eds., Tatakai ni Ikite: Senzen
Fujin Rodo Undo e no Shogen (Domesu Shuppan, 1980), Undo ni kaketa onnatachi: senzen fujin undo e no shogen, 194–214; and Rodo Undoshi Kenkyukai
and Rodosha Kyoiku Kyokai, eds., Nihon Rodo Undo no Rekishi (San’ichi
Shobo, 1960), 179–94.
35. In this sense the Japanese Modern Girl was not unlike the New Woman
of Weimar Germany. In the words of Atina Grossman, “This New Woman was
not merely a media myth or a demographer’s paranoid fantasy, but a social reality that can be researched and documented. She existed in office and factory,
bedroom and kitchen, just as surely as in café, cabaret, and film. I think it is important that we begin to look at the New Woman as producer and not only consumer, as an agent constructing a new identity which was then marketed in
mass culture, even as mass culture helped to form that identity” (“Girlkultur
or Thoroughly Rationalized Female: A New Woman in Weimar Germany,” in
Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change, ed. Judith Friedlander,
Blanche Wiesen Cook, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
[Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986], 64).
36. Ueda, “Josei Zasshi,” in Minami, NMK, 120. The renovation and expansion of department stores between 1924 and 1930 also serve as an index of
changes in consumer behavior. Hagiwara’s reminiscence is from Hagiwara
Yoko, Chichi: Hagiwara Sakutaro (1959), in Imai Seiichi, Shinsai ni Yuragu,
vol. 6 of Nihon no Hyakunen (Chikuma Shobo, 1961–64), 165.
37. Minakami Takitaro, “Teito Fukkosai Yokyo,” Mita Bungaku, May 1930,
reprinted in Imai, Shinsai ni Yuragu, 166–68.
38. Kon Wajiro, ed., Shinban Dai Tokyo Annai (Chuo Koronsha, 1929; Hihyosha, 1986); and Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, Modan Gaaru (1926). Both cited in Imai,
Shinsai ni Yuragu, 162.
39. The appearance of a number of surveys, by such pundits as Yamakawa
Kikue and by government officials such as the unidentified gentleman who in
1931 ruefully admitted that Ibsen’s Nora had been a prophet, aimed at scientifically analyzing this new social phenomenon and offered one index of the widespread concern over the definition of the working woman. See Yamakawa
Kikue, “Gendai Shokugyo Fujinron,” in Shicho (part 1), in Maruoka, vol. 8 of
NFMSS, 334–44; Margit Nagy, “Middle-Class Working Women during the Interwar Years,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Bernstein
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 199–216; and Maeda Ai, Kindai
Dokusha no Seiritsu (Iwanami Shoten, 1993), 225–26. The term shokugyo fujin
has come to be associated with a middle-class response to the creation of thousands of jobs in the expanded tertiary sector after the Russo-Japanese War and
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accompanying the economic boom during World War I. See, for example, Margit Nagy, “‘How Shall We Live?’ Social Change, the Family Institution, and
Feminism in Prewar Japan” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1981),
118–38; and Murakami Nobuhiko, Taishoki no Shokugyo Fujin (Domesu Shuppan, 1983). In many instances, however, the working woman was associated
with the Modern Girl or the working-class woman. See Kataoka’s contention
that the term Modern Girl originated as a means of referring to the shokugyo
fujin (“Modan Gaaru no Kenkyu,” 164); and Obayashi Munetsugu’s query, “Is
the Café Waitress a Working Woman?” in “‘Jokyu’ Shakaishi,” Chuo Koron,
April 1932, 151–62. Kon Wajiro, ed., Shinban Dai Tokyo Annai, 281–81,
291–92.
40. Margit Nagy’s essay documents the entry of married women into the
workforce in the 1920s. For the monthly expenditures and income of the average salaryman, see Nagy, “Middle-Class Working Women during the Interwar
Years” in Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 156–58. The consumption of the salaried worker must be placed in the context of the depressed food
and housing prices that were part of the overall crisis of Japanese capitalism.
When the world depression hit in 1929, the economy had not recovered from
the shocks of the post–World War I depression, the 1923 earthquake, the run on
banks during the panic of 1927, and the recession following the panic. By 1931,
when Japan went off the gold standard, the country was in the midst of a severe
depression.
41. Kano Masanao, Senzen “Ie” no Shiso, 112–15. The words are from the
title of a critique by Oku Mumeo written in 1923, cited in Kazoku Seido, ed.
Yuzawa Yasuhiko, vol. 5 of NFMSS, 28. Murakami goes in this direction when
he notes the contradiction between the emphasis on love and romance in the
Taisho era and the reality of the legal system that was challenged by women’s
new engagement in education and work; see Murakami Nobuhiko, Taisho Joseishi (Rironsha, 1982), 1–4. For excellent documentation of the debate on revision of the code and the discourse surrounding the debate, see Nagy, “‘How
Shall We Live?’” 198–219, 255. See also Maruoka, vol. 5 of NFMSS. For an article from 1924 on the destruction of the family which listed as three reasons
for the collapse of the patriarchal system the end of the family as an economic
unit, the power of the state, and the extension of individualism, see Kawada
Shiro, “Kachosei Kazoku Soshiki no Hokai: Kazoku Seido Hokai no Kiun,” in
Kazoku seido, ed. Yuzawa, vol. 5 of NFMSS, 438–53.
42. Sharon Nolte, “Women’s Rights and Society’s Needs: Japan’s 1931 Suffrage Bill,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, no. 1 (October
1986): 18–19. Although Murakami has argued that education and the increase
in the number of working women, more than their organized protest movements, served to liberate women from the family system enshrined in the Civil
Code, the role of a variety of political interest groups in changing the attitudes
of women and men cannot be ignored; see Murakami, Taisho Joseishi, 2. For a
use of the term fufu sogi, see Kitamura, “Kai Teiso,” 137.
43. For an excellent chronology, see Kindai Nihon Fujin Mondai Nenpyo,
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ed. Naruoka Hideko and Yamaguchi Miyoko, vol. 10 of NFMSS. Fujime Yuki
provides an insightful history of the mobilization of café waitresses at a time
when they were not taken seriously as workers by either most women’s organizations or by most social commentators writing about them as sex workers. See Fujime Yuki, Sei no Rekishigaku (Fuji Shuppan, 1997), 288–94.
44. For detailed statistics, see Fujime, Sei no Rekishigaku.
45. Lois Banner notes that the flapper sent a mixed sexual message, and she
makes the important connection between the flapper’s play and the experience
of the working woman: “The cultural focus on fashion and after-hours activities in the lives of these women glamorized the working world for women while
trivializing it” (Banner, American Beauty [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983], 279, 280). See Rayna Rapp and Ellen Ross, “The 1920s: Feminism,
Consumerism, and Political Backlash in the United States,” in Friedlander et al.,
Women in Culture and Politics, 52–61.
46. One metaphor for the contemporary woman’s multifaceted image was
that of a colorless proteus who has been liberated from the darkness of her
household to take on the hues of her environment; see Kitamura, “Kai Teiso,”
135–36. Three historians have looked beyond the stereotype of the Modern Girl
to see a discourse constituted by contradiction. Sato Takeshi, who likens the
Modern Girl to the flapper, traces a shift from the Modern Girl as emblem of
women’s new customs to the Modern Girl as juvenile delinquent (“Modanizumu
to Amerikaka,” in Minami, NMK, 26, 41–43). Ueda notes a multiplicity of definitions in his discussion of the relationship of women’s magazines to a Japanese
modernism (“Josei Zasshi,” in Minami, NMK, 137). In a wide-ranging essay covering the working woman, women’s education, advice columns, and women’s
magazines, Hamill, in her original work on the Modern Girl, like Ueda, talks in
terms of a discourse. Adopting the term modan gaaru ron, she analyzes the coexistence of positive and critical assessments of the Modern Girl. She attributes
the pejorative aspects of the discourse to the influence of Marxism on intellectuals who could see the “Modern Girl” only as an expression of faddish mores,
and to sensationalism in the press. She sides with Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke to
emphasize that the Modern Girl signified “the emergence of a new consciousness
for women” breaking loose from traditional power relationships. See Hamill,
“Josei,” in Minami, NMK, 208–25. For Davis’s “disorderly” women see Natalie
Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France:
Eight Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 143–45. Although
Davis’s claim that “a topos of sexual inversion placing woman on top in a hierarchy of power relationships was a resource for private and public life” (150) is
far from definitive, and my discussion here has argued that the representation of
the Modern Girl followed rather than encouraged political actions, the influence
of the media on the actions of Japanese women during the interwar era deserves
serious attention. In this respect the Japanese Modern Girl resembles her American sister, the flapper, for, as Paula Fass has shown, young women, even more
than men, symbolized disorder and rebellion in the United States during the
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1920s (The Damned and the Beautiful [New York: Oxford University Press,
1977], 6, 22).
47. Kitamura, “Kai Teiso,” 137.
48. The concept of a “repository of the past” is provided by Sharon Sievers,
who is working from a theoretical formulation by Hanna Papenak. Sharon Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 17.
49. Sato Takeshi, “Modanizumu to Amerikaka,” in Minami NMK, 41–42. I
do not agree with Sato’s notion of a two-stage development of the term Modern Girl, in which she stood first for Western customs and later for criminal actions. The positive and pejorative connotations of her actions from the mid1920s into the 1930s must be further explored. Ichikawa, “Ryukoka ni Miru
Modanizumu to Ero Guro Nansensu,” 267.
50. Ito Shunsui, “Jidai Fuzoku Etoki,” Chuo Koron, April 1932.
51. Kitamura used the term kansei (completion) to connote fulfillment
(“Kai Teiso,” 139). Regarding the notion of periodization, see Kiyosawa,
“Modaan Gaaru no Kenkyu,” 158. See, for example, the exhibition catalog Modern Boy Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art, 1910–1935 (Kanagawa: Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1998), 87, 89, 90, 94–95. Although it displays conventional photographs of women in flapper garb, it also includes satirical cartoon
art that raises such issues as gender ambiguity, the politicization of young
women (a “proletarian moga” is featured), and new attitudes toward the public
display of the nude body.
the café waitress sang the blues
1. Langston Hughes is quoted in Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black
Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 145. See Hazel Carby, “It Jus Be’s Dat . . . Way
Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L.
Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1990), 241, and Daphne Duval Harrison, Black
Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1988). For an overview of Awaya Noriko’s career, see Awaya Noriko,
Waga Horoki (Nihon Tosho Sentaa, 1997)
2. Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 18–20.
3. Davis sees the blues as a working-class form set on an “African cultural
continuum” informed by such elements as the poverty and racism of the 1920s,
the transformation in sexual relationships after the end of slavery, slave culture,
and West African religion (Davis, Blues Legacies, 33, 49, 67–69, 74). Elements
such as community building could be found in jokyu culture also. For a wise
warning against romanticizing putative acts of resistance that may in fact “ultimately legitimate dominant norms,” see Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Plea-
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